they were setting up the crane this morning and this evening it's gone --- one of midtown's great old tulip poplars --- the house is fine, dating to the 1890s, and the tree was almost as old --- the place already had a driveway and front steps, but they weren't exactly where the new owners wanted them so they went and dug up all around the east and north side of the tree --- it hadn't looked good this season and i was pretty sure it wouldn't come back next year anyway --- hope they are satisfied now

the first orchid starting to bud this season, and the porte cochere is open after having been closed for three weeks while they stripped and recoated it with a non-skid surface --- no more squealing tire!

17 November 2011

what's up with the backwards swastika? my grandfather's ku klux regalia from the 1920s was unfortunately destroyed by my thoroughly embarrassed grandmother in the 1950s after my stroked-out grandfather dragged it out to show my brother --- his probably wasn't as nice as these, what with the little applique around the hem and all

16 November 2011

just finished montefiore's "biography" of jerusalem --- 3,000 years of building up and tearing down, centuries of religious conflict, a continuity of families stretching back hundreds of years --- adds a whole lot of understanding about israel and palestine in the 21st century --- four stars

14 November 2011

i hate what they're doing to marietta street: they've cut down all the trees so they can dig it all up and fence it all in!!! so the dogs won't shit in it!!!!! although the official reason is to prevent jaywalking, which the now-razed landscaping was already doing ---- grrrrr

on the other hand, they've started surveying for the new street car line, which might breathe some life into sweet auburn ---

13 November 2011

broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime― mark twain

truly, what of good

ever have prophets brought to men?

craft of many words,

only through

evil your message speaks.

seers bring aye

terror, so to keep

men afraid.

―

aeschylus

he cannot be a gentleman which loveth not a dog.

john northbrooke, c. 1570

Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.

The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung. Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.

john stuart mill in a letter to conservative mp sir john pakington (march 1866)